MCA: Crime

MCA: Crime

Village law for Minecraft Comes Alive: Reborn—witnessed crimes, persistent cases, guards, jail, fines, kidnapping, ransom, mugging, and consequences that survive a restart.

MCA Reborn already tracks how individual villagers feel about you. MCA: Crime adds the legal layer around those relationships: what happened, who witnessed it, which village has jurisdiction, how much Heat you have attracted, whether force against you is lawful, and how each case was resolved.

Commit a crime unseen and the village may never learn about it. Do it in front of witnesses and the incident can produce Heat, reports, guard intervention, relationship damage, and—when MCA: Reputation is installed—public gossip that spreads through the community.

MCA: Crime is server-authoritative. It does not use generative AI, send gameplay data to an external service, or manufacture outcomes on the client.

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What is new in 0.3.0

Version 0.3.0 introduces the first complete action-and-balancing pass.

• Expanded Crime interaction menu: Mug, Restrain, and Apologize are now presented together. Demand Ransom and Release Captive appear when the selected villager is your active captive. Unavailable actions remain visible where useful and explain what requirement is missing.
• Finite mugging economy: every villager has a persisted purse with a capacity and bounded daily refill. Payouts are also limited per offender and per village, preventing emerald farming.
• Reliable first payout: fresh villagers—and old 0.3.0 purse records affected by the original zero-value seed—begin with at least one emerald when purse capacity permits it.
• Victim memory and reactions: the direct victim remembers the offender, panics for a short configurable period, and can report the mugging. Negative standing no longer makes every nearby villager run forever.
• Guard reports and surrender window: a reported mugging can alert nearby guards before the offender reaches the normal Wanted threshold. Guards issue a warning and allow a short chance to surrender before using force.
• Safer custody state: capture, ransom, guard targeting, login reconciliation, and release all use the authoritative world custody table. Legacy or invisible captive records no longer depend on a stale one-captive cache.
• Player recovery command: /crime releasecaptive releases unlawful captive records owned by the player. Duplicate legacy records are also reconciled during login.
• Action replay protection: exact targets, request nonces, actor locks, and target locks prevent duplicate payouts, repeated requests, and simultaneous capture conflicts.
• Craftable restraints: rope, cuffs, and locked cuffs now have recipes and are consumed only when a capture successfully commits.
• Persisted escape work: escaping is a timed, interruptible attempt with one deterministic roll, not a command that can be repeated to reroll success.

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Crime actions

Open MCA's normal villager interaction screen and select Crime…. If the installed MCA layout cannot expose that button, Shift+interact with an empty hand opens the same server-issued menu. Gameplay commands are accessibility fallbacks and use the same validation, cooldowns, locks, and finite accounts as the menu.

Mug

Threaten the exact villager you selected through a short channel. Moving away, losing sight of the victim, or being interrupted can break the action, but beginning the threat still creates memory and legal consequences.

A completed mug transfers emerald value from the victim's finite purse. It does not create free money, switch to a nearby bystander, or reset merely because the villager unloaded. Repeating the same victim is limited by memory and cooldowns, while offender and village caps prevent rotating through an entire settlement for unlimited profit.

Killing a recently mugged victim becomes murder during a robbery, the heaviest built-in charge, and does not grant another mugging payout. Profession death drops during that window are disabled by default so murder is not more profitable than robbery.

Restrain and capture

Capture is a channel rather than a single click. The target must be eligible and vulnerable, and the captor must have a supported restraint. Taking damage, moving too far, losing line of sight, or letting the target escape range breaks the attempt.

• Rope: fast to apply and easier to escape.
• Cuffs: slower to apply and harder to escape.
• Locked cuffs: strongest restraint; ordinary struggle alone cannot open them.

Captured NPCs are never deleted. Custody is persisted, bounded by safety timers, and unwound on release, escape, rescue, death, invalid ownership, or administrative recovery.

Demand ransom

An unlawful captor can demand a ransom for the selected captive. The payer is resolved by family priority—spouse, parent, adult child, sibling, then close relative—with an optional lower-value village-authority fallback. Family payers must be reachable online players.

Demands expire and have victim, family, and village cooldowns. A demand immediately becomes invalid if the captive dies, escapes, is rescued, or enters lawful custody. Village-authority payments come from a finite persisted treasury rather than newly created emeralds.

Apologize and release

Apologize is a bounded restorative action. It can slowly repair negative MCA hearts toward zero, but cannot create positive-heart farms, erase a crime case, remove stolen-value memory, or replace paying a fine.

Release Captive appears for the exact villager you unlawfully hold. /crime releasecaptive provides the same player-facing recovery path when an old or unloaded captive cannot be selected in the world.

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Law, witnesses, and enforcement

Karma and Heat

MCA: Crime separates long-term identity from immediate police attention.

• Karma changes slowly and determines your band: Lawful, Neutral, or Outlaw.
• Heat represents current enforcement pressure. It decays while you are online and makes you Wanted after the configured threshold.

The two values do not automatically overwrite one another. A known Outlaw can lie low without being Wanted, while a normally Lawful player can attract serious short-term Heat.

Witnessed crimes

Witnesses are resolved around the victim at the moment the crime occurs. Distance, line of sight, entity type, and configuration determine who actually saw it. Their identities are stored on the case rather than guessed later.

Unwitnessed crimes still affect the offender's private Karma, but normally generate no Heat because the village does not know what happened. Direct victims can retain offender-specific memory and report actions such as mugging.

Guards and legal targets

Guards pursue players who are lawful targets because they are Wanted, escaped prisoners, active kidnappers, or—when enabled—known Outlaws. The player receives a message explaining why guards are intervening.

Nearby guards challenge the suspect first and allow a short surrender window. The challenge timer does not begin from nowhere: a real guard must be present in the configured radius. Ordinary villagers are not placed into a permanent global flee loop; active fleeing is limited to the direct victim's short panic state.

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Jail, fines, and case resolution

Every offence is recorded as a case with a stable ID, offender, victim, jurisdiction, witness set, time, legal values, and resolution. Cases can be unresolved, fined, served, pardoned, escaped, or otherwise closed through explicit transitions.

• Fines settle eligible unresolved cases oldest-first and debit real emeralds.
• Serious cases can exceed the fine threshold and require jail or another resolution.
• Surrender clears escape state, reduces Heat, and can shorten the resulting sentence.
• Sentences count online ticks: logging out pauses time instead of serving the sentence offline.
• Jail state survives death, dimension changes, logout, and server restart.
• Configurable containment mode can return prisoners to the jail area and protect its blocks.
• Physical-jail mode permits a real escape, which creates a jailbreak case rather than silently cancelling the sentence.
• Safety ceilings and /crime release provide administrative recovery from invalid confinement.

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MCA: Reputation integration

MCA: Reputation is optional. MCA: Crime works by itself using its built-in village standing store.

When MCA: Reputation 0.2.0 or newer is present and the bridge handshake succeeds, MCA: Crime becomes the single producer for villager assault and death incidents. This prevents the same act from being recorded twice. Crime cases are published as public incidents, while paying a fine, serving a sentence, and rescuing a captive can publish restorative outcomes.

Cross-mod writes use a persisted outbox with deduplication and retry handling. Temporarily removing the companion mod or crashing during delivery does not silently discard the legal event.

One balancing difference is intentional: MCA: Reputation alone may fold an assault into a later killing, while MCA: Crime keeps the assault and killing as separately resolvable cases. A beating followed by murder can therefore reduce public standing more than Reputation's standalone defaults.

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Player information and presentation

• The inventory reputation card shows Karma, band, Heat, Wanted state, sentence time, lawful-target state, and captivity status.
• Player nameplates can be tinted by band without replacing nickname formatting.
• Ambient messages report band changes, witnessed crimes, and the reason a guard is pursuing you.
• Server-authoritative chat coloring by band is available but disabled by default.

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Commands

All commands are under /crime. Players can inspect and act on their own state without operator permission. Reading another player's legal state requires permission level 2; mutations and administration require level 3.

/crime karma                                 show your Karma and band
/crime status                                show Karma, Heat, Wanted, jail, and escape state
/crime payfine                               settle eligible cases, oldest first
/crime surrender                             surrender near an eligible authority
/crime mug                                   mug the exact villager in your crosshair
/crime ransom                                demand ransom for an active captive
/crime payransom                             pay a ransom for a held relative
/crime escape                                begin or continue timed escape work
/crime releasecaptive                        release unlawful captive records you own

/crime query <player>                        inspect another player                 (level 2)
/crime ledger <player>                       inspect another player's cases         (level 2)
/crime debug villager|custody|actions        inspect runtime feature state          (level 2)
/crime debug integrations                    inspect compatibility and outbox state  (level 2)
/crime debug outbox [dead]                   inspect queued or failed deliveries     (level 2)

/crime validate                              validate configuration and content      (level 3)
/crime reload                                reload datapack crime definitions       (level 3)
/crime set karma|heat <player> <value>                                              (level 3)
/crime clearheat <player>                                                           (level 3)
/crime jail <player> <ticks>                                                       (level 3)
/crime release <player>                      universal jail/custody backstop         (level 3)
/crime assignjail <pos> [radius]                                                    (level 3)

/crime debug integrations deliberately avoids printing player UUIDs so its output can be included in a public bug report.

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Compatibility and requirements

Component	Requirement
Minecraft	1.20.1
Mod loader	Forge 47.x; built and tested with 47.4.10
Required	MCA Reborn 7.6.x or 7.7.x ([7.6,8))
Optional	MCA: Reputation 0.2.0+
Java	Java 17

MCA: Crime resolves MCA integration through a runtime compatibility layer rather than linking one specific MCA package layout. The same jar is tested against MCA Reborn 7.6.20, 7.7.0-beta.2, and 7.7.1-alpha.2 package layouts.

Architectury does not need to be declared separately by this mod. Install the dependencies required by your chosen MCA Reborn build normally.

Installation

1. Install Minecraft 1.20.1 and Forge 47.x.
2. Install a compatible MCA Reborn version.
3. Put the MCA: Crime jar in the mods folder on both the client and server.
4. Optionally install MCA: Reputation 0.2.0 or newer on both sides.
5. Start the game once to generate config/mcacrime-common.toml and config/mcacrime-client.toml.

For an existing world, make a backup before upgrading. Version 0.3.0 migrates older saved crime data to schema 4 when the world loads. The migration is designed to be forward-safe but is not reversible by installing an older jar.

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Configuration and datapacks

Nearly every subsystem and balancing value is configurable: Karma bands, Heat and decay, witness rules, guard radii, victim panic, fines, jail, surrender, capture vulnerability, restraint strength, escape timing, ransom prices and cooldowns, mugging purses and daily caps, relationship effects, messages, presentation, and optional integrations.

Crime definitions are datapack-driven:

data/<namespace>/mcacrime/crimes/*.json

MCA: Reputation incident definitions are datapack-driven as well:

data/<namespace>/mcareputation/incidents/*.json

/crime reload reloads those definitions, and /crime validate reports configuration or content problems with their precise file and field.

Full documentation is maintained in the repository:

• Configuration reference
• Datapack formats
• Migration notes
• Java API
• Changelog

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For mod developers

MCA: Crime exposes a read-only, server-authoritative Java API and Forge events for crimes, witnessing, Karma and Heat changes, Wanted changes, jail, release, custody, fines, and case resolution. Public reads return immutable views and safe empty results instead of exposing mutable internal state. Gameplay mutation remains behind the mod's authoritative services so integrations cannot bypass idempotency, case transitions, or economy rules.

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Current status

MCA: Crime 0.3.0 is an alpha release. Back up important worlds and report problems with the MCA, Forge, and MCA: Crime versions you are using. /crime debug integrations and /crime debug custody provide useful diagnostic summaries.

Current presentation limitations:

• English localization only.
• The three restraint items currently use placeholder vanilla-derived item textures.

Licensed GPL-3.0-only, matching MCA Reborn.